Two child abusing parents in southern Sweden, who tried to exorcise supposed demons from their young daughter by beating her and making her drink urine, have been found guilty and jailed for aggravated assault by a Swedish court.

The step-mother was sentenced to spend two and a half years in jail, while the father was sentenced to two years and three months.

Their daughter was nine years old at the time of the assaults in 2007 and 2008. She shared details of her abuse several years later with the authorities. Among other incidents, she was forced to drink a mixture of her own urine and cleaning fluid until she vomited, all because her parents thought she was a witch. Her father and step-mother had also tried to administer electric shocks in the girl's mouth.

The court also felled a pastor who was drafted in to help expel demons from the young girl's body. He was convicted of unlawful detention, abuse, and for acting as an accomplice to harassment.

The head of Saudi Arabia's religious police has warned citizens against using Twitter, which is rising in popularity among Saudis.

Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh made up a few nonsense claims and pronounced that anyone using social media sites - and especially Twitter - has lost this world and his afterlife .

The sheikh's comments echo those of the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in April who used his sermon - seen by millions on TV - to warn that Twitter was a threat to national unity, a BBC correspondent said.

Earlier, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, the kingdom's most senior Muslim cleric, had unimaginatively dismissed Twitter users as fools .

Saudi authorities have mooted moves that could inhibit Twitter users by linking their online accounts to their Saudi ID numbers.

A German federal court has told Google to censor the auto-complete results that its search engine suggests.

The court said Google must ensure terms generated by auto-complete are not contrary to the wishes of those that complain.

The court case was started by an unnamed German businessman who found that Google.de linked him with scientology and fraud . Google must now remove certain word combinations when told about them, said the court.

A person's privacy would be violated if the associations conjured up by auto-complete were claimed to be untrue, the federal court said in a statement about the ruling. However, it added, this did not mean that Google had to sanitise its entire index. The operator is, as a basic principle, only responsible when it gets notice of the unlawful violation of personal rights.

The ruling on auto-complete overturns two earlier decisions by lower German courts.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency in three north-eastern states of Nigeria after muslim extremists took control of a number of villages and towns. Jonathan said, according to The Associated Press:

It would appear that there is a systematic effort by insurgents and terrorists to destabilize the Nigerian state and test our collective resolve.

Army troops have been ordered to the affected states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, while politicians have been told to remain at their posts. The announcement was made across Nigeria's radio and television networks, with the president warning that any buildings believed to be housing Islamic extremists would be torn down.

Islamic extremist group Boko Haram is said to be behind most of the attacks that have killed close to 3,000 people in the last few years. Boko Haram has openly declared that its mission is to drive out all Christians from the North and make Nigeria an Islamic state.

Update: Army in action against extremists

17th May 2013. See article from bbc.co.uk

Nigeria's army has begun operations against militant Islamists in the north-east, military officials say. They say troops raided parts of a game reserve in Borno state where the Boko Haram group has established bases.

The raids came after states of emergency were declared in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa north-eastern states, where 2,000 people have died since Boko Haram launched an insurgency in 2009.

Rights activists in Kyrgyzstan are campaigning against a parliamentary proposal to bar women under the age of 23 from travelling abroad without their parents' consent.

In a country where hundreds of thousands of migrant workers go to Russia and other states every year, supporters of the restrictions claim they just want to protect vulnerable young women from the risk of abuse. Irgal Kadyralieva, the parliamentarian who drafted the proposal, told legislators on March 4 that in some cases, the right to free movement had to be outweighed by other considerations.

The Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ is campaigning against a move its members see as unconstitutional and discriminatory on both sex and age grounds. For opponents of the plan, it seems perverse to impose restrictions on young women on the grounds that they are potential victims, not perpetrators of crimes.

Aida Kasymalieva of the Kyrgyz service of RFE/RL told IWPR about the background to this unusual proposal. She has reported on cases where female Kyrgyz migrant workers have been attacked by their male counterparts who accuse them of loose behaviour . Last year she broke the story of one such assault, on a woman called Sapargul, which was filmed and posted on the internet.

According to an article from sltrib.com, Nkoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won't find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn't be in jail if he hadn't produced a video crudely lampooning the religious character Muhammad.

In response to the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, the Obama administration claimed the terrorist assault had been the outgrowth of a demonstration against the video. In a speech at the United Nations, the president declared, no doubt with Nakoula in mind: The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Lo and behold, Nakoula was brought in for questioning by five Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies at midnight, eventually arrested and held without bond, and finally thrown into jail for a year.

Hwoever Nakoula's offences were not trivial. He has a history of fraud. A few years ago, he was sentenced to nearly two years in jail on bank-fraud charges. He was jailed for violating the terms of his probation by using an alias (something Nakoula admits). Apparently he applied for a driving licence in a false name.

Conspiracy theory or blasphemy?